The Marijuana Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page B

front of the room observing, Mattia hunched over his desk frowning and grimacing in a kind of exquisite pain, as if he were talking to himself.
    Sometimes, during class discussion, Agnes saw Mattia looking at her—particularly, at her —with a brooding expression, in which there was no recognition; at such times, his face was mask-like and unsmiling, and seemed rather chilling to her. She hadn’t known at the time what his prison sentence was for but she’d thought, He has killed someone. That is the face of a killer .
    But, as if waking from a trance, in the next moment Mattia smiled, and waved his hand for Agnes to call upon him— Ms. Agnes!
    She loved to hear her name in his velvety voice. She loved to see his eyes light up, and the mask-like killer-face vanish in an instant, as if it had never been.
    Instructors in the composition course used an expository writing text that was geared for “remedial” readers yet contained essays, in primer English, on such provocative topics as racial integration, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, freedom of speech and of the press, “patriotism” and “terrorism.” There was a section on the history of the American civil rights movement, and there was a section on the history of Native Americans and “European” conquest. Agnes assigned the least difficult of the essays, to which her students were to respond in compositions of five hundred words or so. Just write as if you were speaking to the author. You agree, or disagree — just write down your thoughts .
    Most of the students were barely literate. In their separate worlds, inaccessible to their instructor, they were likely individuals who aroused fear in others, or at least apprehension; but in the classroom, they were disadvantaged as overgrown children. Slowly, with care, Agnes went through their compositions line by line for the benefit of the entire class. The inmate-students had ideas, to a degree—but their ability to express themselves in anything other than simple childish expletives was primitive; and their attitude toward Agnes, respectful at first, if guarded, quickly became sullen and resentful. Even when Agnes tried to praise the “strengths” in their writing, they came to distrust her, for the “suggestions” that were sure to come.
    Mattia was quick-witted and shrewd, and usually had no difficulty understanding the essays, but his writing was so strangely condensed, Agnes often didn’t know what he was trying to say. It was as if the young man was distrustful of speaking outright. He wrote in the idiom of the street but it was a heightened and abbreviated idiom, succinct as code. From time to time Agnes looked up from one of his tortuous compositions thinking, This is poetry! When Mattia read his compositions aloud to the class, he read in a way that seemed to convey meaning, yet often the other inmates didn’t seem to understand him, either.
    She couldn’t determine if the other inmates liked Mattia. She couldn’t determine if any of the inmates were friends. In the classes, it was common for inmate-students to sit as far apart from one another as they could, including in the corners of the room, since, in their cells, as Agnes’s supervisor had told her, they were in constant overly close quarters.
    When, in class, Agnes questioned Mattia about the meaning of his sentences (taking care always to be exceedingly considerate and not to appear to be “critical”), Mattia could usually provide the words he’d left out. He seemed not to understand how oblique his meaning was, how baffled the others were.
    “We can’t read your mind, Joseph”—so Agnes had said.
    She’d meant to be playful, and Mattia had looked startled, and then laughed.
    “Ms. Agnes, ma’am, that is a damn good thing!”
    The rest of the inmate-students laughed with Mattia, several of them quite coarsely. Agnes chose to ignore the moment, and to move on.
    During the ten-week course, Mattia was the only student